The trip to the Pentagon on Wednesday meshed very well with the issues we have been discussing in class this past week. One of the topics we kept circling is why we, as a population, consider issues like terrorism to “qualify” as part of national security, while other sources of American deaths and danger, such as high speed limits, do not. Some of the debate seems to be about how according to public perception, terrorism is more dangerous, even though car accidents kill many more people on average. However, while this observation is very likely true, I do not believe it is the whole answer. Neither danger, nor the perception of it, are the qualifications for national security -- cancer is considered an extremely urgent and dangerous issue, but no one considers it part of national security. It seems instead that while national security includes domestic policy, it must also include an external threat to the country’s safety.
Of course, given the fact that in the national security strategy, securing the nation against threats to it means taking domestic actions that on the surface have nothing to do with a particular danger, this issue has a difficult time separating the domestic and foreign policy spheres. What is the best way to protect the U.S? Strengthening ourselves at home to eliminate weaknesses, or striking out to eliminate the threats themselves? The national security strategy stresses both approaches, but its obvious that the latter triumphs in matters of crisis. The discussion of overreaction seemed to constantly become entangled with the point that we have very different approaches to foreign and domestic issues. In foreign issues, we want government, strong government, and lots of it, to act directly upon the people and forces who threaten us and eliminate them. In domestic issues, we have an opposition that sometimes borders on paranoia to government intervention, from regulation of the economy to the clash between federal and state issues. We profess that this is because we would rather have the freedom to do what we want without going through rules and regulations, rather than put up with such interference and become safer and better off. Yet when foreign threat occur close to home rather than far away, we still allow the government to get deeply involved, to the point of wiretapping and holding people with dubious cause when the situation is -- in the point of view of the American people -- dire enough.
When we visited the Pentagon, I was disappointed that our planned briefing was cancelled, but it seemed appropriate that it was cancelled for the reasons it had -- a situation had cropped up somewhere overseas, and people were called away to attend to it. I don’t know if everyone would share this with me, but I am sure that if we were visiting the Department of Justice, for example, and our presenters suddenly got called away, I’d feel much less charitable towards them than those at the Pentagon. In foreign affairs, it is rather impressive and commendable that these people drop everything to ensure our security, whereas in domestic issues, it wouldn’t feel nearly as justified.
Perhaps it is because in foreign affairs, there is usually a clear-cut “them”. There is Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban. Even when there isn’t a face or title to attach to the threats, they are still a “them”. There are undemocratic regimes that strip women of natural rights, corrupt leaders that blatantly rig elections without consequence, and violent factions that kill people for being a member of a certain race. These are un-American. These are enemies of the United States. With domestic issues it’s much harder. There may be some labels we can apply, but they tend to be contradictory and vague, and highly dependent on the times -- CEOs, bank executives, criminals who deal in everything from drugs to high-level fraud, deluded liberals, teacher’s unions, corporate sponsors, crazy conservatives, oil companies, car companies, insurance companies...how vague and riddled with qualifiers are these “threats”, in the eyes of the public (and the media) as opposed to the seemingly clear ones faced in foreign affairs? How exactly do we “overreact” to the financial system’s failings without hurting ourselves in ways much more obvious than the convoluted, long-term, and highly indirect ways we hurt ourselves when we overreact to foreign threats? We overreact to foreign threats because we can, because there is, or we think there is, something there to react to and defeat. It is hard to secure our nation against domestic issues, because we have the notion -- sometimes correct, sometimes woefully shortsighted -- that domestic action will affect the American people much more than foreign action will.
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